Everything posted by Ashaman73

One of the most basic combat system is just hp and damage.
attack:
hp'=hp-dmg
From here you can start your journey to add more options. E.g. take armor like this:
attack:
hp'=hp-dmg*1/(1+armor)
This is nothing more than scaling the hp by reducing the dmg. So, you could simply scale the hp instead of adding armor. So, why add armor at all ?
You need to add a meaningful option/decision to armor to add some value. E.g. you could add some armor piercing attacks etc, then armor is suddenly a hp-buff which can be ignored by some special attacks.
So, instead of just adding hit/miss, resistences, dodges etc. you should think about the additional options to the player and try to avoid to add features which just obfuscate the basic idea ,like adding armor without adding some option
to overcome it.

Simulation games are system games. The challenge and goal of these kind of games is to master the system, to understand
how it work. Once you have mastered it, there's nothing more to learn.
You can try to introduce features from other kind of games. There are story driven games (are you able to write an interesting story), competitive games (multiplayer and some kind of ranking), game mechanism (similiar to system, once you have mastered it you need more challenges) etc.
But this could end in making two games in one and each game part competing with each other.
You can add options to challenge the knowledge of the player:
1. Add some kind of time pressure, so that the player need to execute his knowledge more optimized.
2. Limit certain resources, so that the player is forced to find alternative routes to solve the challenges.
3. Forget knowledge, i.e. like the potion colors in some roguelike. Instead of always using the red potion as healing potion the player need to learn, that after restart it could be the blue or yellow potion.
You can extend this to crafting:. you can only craft obsidian weapons in one game and after restart you can craft only metal weapons, or stone or bone etc.

For audio check out this site for some affordable SFX libs. With Audacity, as you already mentioned, you get a free and good sound manipulation software. Either use sounds directly or combine them and you will get some pretty decent sound effect quickly into your game.
As solo-hobby game dev, embrace the pareto principle (reaching 80% of the goal by investing just 20% of effort).

I would sugguest to modify your workflow, taking from my own experiences:
1. Player character you can move. (check)
2. Enemy character you can fight against. (ckeck)
3. A simple level to play on. => a debug level/testground/arena, where you can spawn enemies at will and fine tune your combat sytem
4. A decent attack for both player and enemy. (ckeck)
5. Sounds. => add sound much earlier, it adds soo much to the player experiences ! Your game will feel more complete immediatly.
6. Basic special attacks for enemies and player. (this is the bread and butter of a diablo clone, cool attack options).
7. Basic item system..
8. Maps or at least better levels.
9. Some form of progression, for example option to access higher area levels. This inculdes adding more powerful enemies, attacks, items and maps.
10. Maybe a boss map.
11. Try and make all systems better starting from the system that feels weakest.

The core game mechanism is still the core, what you do most of the time and what the player will experience first.
If you play a lot of these game like D1, D2, D3, PoE or for a long period, then you will need motivation to continue playing. Therefor long living games have often some kind of meta-game, parts of the game which do not directly influence the gameplay immediatly, but which is important for some ppl in the long run.
As example are certain character levels, or gear sets. If you play diablo from start to end on normal difficulty, then you have experienced most likely all which is part of the core of the game. If you play it on harder difficulty to gain a new gear set, then the gameplay, levels, story do not change, it is just the motivation (challenge & collecting stuff) the player want to overcome.
But if you want to design a game, you should not start with the meta game at all. The meta game is only important if a player thinks that your game is fun enough to play it through and eventually want to invest more time because the core gameplay is so much fun. At this time you need to add some meta-game to add long time motivations.

Well, you say you are stuck and you would like to make a game like D or PoE, then start to analyse their core game.
The core game mechanism of both game is pure combat, that is all. The satisfying and fun part of the game is to mow through hords of monsters.
Then you have features which support the core game mechanism, gear, skills,progression system etc, all which just make you better to mow through harder hords of monsters.
Then you have features which support the support features, like a barter/money system to get more interesting gear etc. You get the hang.
interactive combat (core)
- gear
-- buy/sell
--- auction system
-- crafting
-- enchanching
-- inventory system
- skills
-- skill tree
--- skill map
-- character classes
So, when you are stuck, start with your core game mechanism. THIS must be perfect, combat must feel right, must feel fun. Everything else is not important as long as you dont have a perfect core game mechanism. Once you get your core game mechanism down, add your most important support features, and eventually, once you have them right too, add more smaller support features.
The gear, barter, skill, spell system would be absolutely dull, if D or PoE would have a boring combat system.

Limit the options you have to make a game and you will find more creative ways to design it. In other words, it sounds tempting to use a first-person view game with all its freedom and quite restrictive to use a side-perspective, but on the other hand, you suddenly have so much "user-interaction-space" you need to fill.
An other advantage of limited options in game development is, that you need to focus more on the core-concept/mechanism of your game, because often game designers tend to add new features to make their game more interestnig instead of polishing the core game.
Besides these game design advantages, you often have technically benefits too, even if they are not immediately apparent.

It could work, sometimes, but it is random at best. You have an ugly bug here, which could work most of the time and sometimes will result in a crash or compiler error etc. which could be hard to track down.

Well, the starndard approach of art is to have a vision/concept and make your art in a way, that it satisfy your vision. What you often see, especially by inexperienced artists is, that they made something and defend their art with excuses why it look this way (most often: try to make a human and say that it is an alien after failure).
So, if you show off something, best to show of fthe concept too to avoid critic going into the wrong direction. And eventually, if you ask for critic, don't try to defend your art. If you need to defend your art, you have already failed to deliver your vision to the audience.

I'm unsure of the intention of why you post this video. Do you ask for some advices to improve your art or just showing it off ?
Nevertheless, it looks good.
Still if you like to hear some critics, I would sugguest to isolate the art you want to show off. Do you want critics on your environment, show it without characters. If you want critics on your character, show it without environment. If you want critics on your shader, show it without character. If you want critics on your character topology, show it without textures etc.
Else the qualitity of other stuff will distract from actual art you want to show off.
So, here are some things you could revisit, maybe you like to modify them.
1. The metal parts on the helm and the blade look thin like a piece of paper, you should add some volume.
2. The metal shader does not reflect the environment. You should consider to add some environment map to fake some reflection.
3. The chest muscle are well developed for an undead (watch some Walking Dead episodes for references).
4. The arm proportions are no longer human, as said by Gian-Reto, but this could be ok for a monster type of enemy. Rule of thump for human anatomy: the wrist should be just below the groin.

It is quite common (I would even say 'industry standard' ) to assign textures to modular work, and unwrap/texture characters and important properties (weapons etc.) with individual textures.
When considering effectivity, then using the modular predefined texture workflow will be much better.
When considering visuals, then using individual textures is much better, BUT this will limit the usage. Either you need an engine which supports mega-textures (e.g. id-tech seen in the latest Doom game) or you have limits in your scene size.
My sugguestion would be to avoid individual textures for most of the modular parts and to work with detail models/decals to break up repetitive visuals.

Looks cool, good job. Here are some thoughts:
I immediatly focus the feet, most of the time only the front of the feets are touching the ground, which looks wrong. This is especially obviously in the idle-animation and walk animation.

That is your fault: try to build a system which supports your known requirements and try to utilize it for upcoming requirements.
Limit your system and be creative in utilizing it to find a solution for your upcoming issues (especially if you are the sole dev).
As mentioned before, shift your issues into data, as example I use the following query-approach completly based on data:
1. Every entity has normalized attributes (that is, you have a standard way to access them).
2. Every entity has a stereotype (for fast rooting).
3. My query consists of a list of conditions to attributes (los,range etc.):
3.1. Is an attribute present, does it have a certain value or is within a certain value range ?
3.2. Use optional,external parameters for thresholds, ranges and values.
3.3. Assign a type to a entity which fullfils certain filters/criteria ("danger","prey","ally")
So, now with this system established, I design my game in a way to utilize attributes which satisfy this system, instead of designing the game first and try to find a way to bend(break) the system to query all possible combinations.

My first thought was: wow, depicting a women like this after the dicussion of how the game industry displays women in games in recent years...
You should heed Gian-Reto advices, other companies took quite a beating in form of a sh*tstorms for far less (e.g. Blizzard & Tracer pose).

I really like your style, still I have two thoughts:
1. technically you should change the light effect, it does not match the quality of the rest. (Play around with fading at the edge, adding a yellow touch, playing around with blending modes, using two decals (additive+blend ?) ).
2. Try to make your character more prominent. He is visual appealing and blends nicely in the background, but once you start playing your game, he and other NPCs might not get enough focus.

I would recommend blender (www.blender.org), honestly. It has a really good video editor integrated which works with HD content, separated audio channels, multiple video channels, simple image/text overlays, some effects etc.

If you want to use push/pop matrix, you should do it for each object you render like this
pushMatrix
do transformation
render
popMatrix
Don't mix this like this:
Call pre-render-event for all objects
Render all objects
Call post-render-event for all objects
The latter will not work.
But, the modern way don't use push/pop matrix at all. Today you have some matrix attached to the object representing its orientation and you do one of the following things:
1. (old way): glLoadMatrix to upload the model matrix
2. (better): upload the matrix as uniform to your shader
3. (even better): upload the matrix to uniform block/memory
The easiest way would be glLoadMatrix, as it seems that you are using ancient OpenGL (Version 1.1) now.

Hey, good start :D
Nevertheless, I wouldn't start with stylized art first. The issue with stylized art is, that theoretical you can do a smiley and call it stylized character. This will not help you learning to do character art at all. Best to target real human proportions first, then you have something you can compare to. Once you have a feeling about human proportions, you can exaggerate certain body parts to start stylizing your characters.
Additional to this, I would recommend to leave details out first. The proportions of a human and the overall setup is more important than some folds.
Eventually you should target a consistent level of detail, proportion, stylization etc. E.g. a detailed face and chunky hands are inconsistent. Sometimes it is better to reduce the level of detail in certain parts instead of trying to do the same level of detail for every other body part.
A rough guideline for a indie dev, who want to do the art alone without studying art first :
1. Learn proportions first (e.g. male human height = 8x head etc.).
2. Basic anatomy, which muscle are visible, how do they form the shape of an character .
3. Think twice about the level of detail, to do high detailed models right, you need to practise for years !
4. I do most of the art for my game alone (though with a friend helping out), so think economical, don't target a style which you could do , but which eats up too much time. The effort to add details to a model/texture/animation increases exponentially. So, is it really necessary to do a sculpt and a low-polymodel and a texture ? Wouldn't it be more economical to model a low-polymodel and texture it directly ?
But you are on the right track, it just needs some more practise and you will do model in better quality much faster, keep it up :D

So it is roughly factor 100. The issue, even if this is not a reseller, will be, that the one buying a bundle will resell unused keys himself.
So, it might be not the best idea to flood the market with 100.000 keys for $100, just to get lot of re-selled keys (-profit) and negative reviews from uninterested bundle buyers (-profit).

It depends on the context. Just scaling a npc is not really satisfying. You should add something which requires a new strategy to approach the enemies other then hitting the attack button more often.
E.g. an elite version of a npc should have some extra feature/skill the standard version does not have.
Taking your example, a standard goblin has almost no armor, whereas a champion is armored (choice of other attack spells) and an elite goblin is able to call reinforces.

A good start, but you should reconsider the overall design. Currently the gun is taking up all attention, leaving your bot as simple weapon holder. Here are some rough guidelines:
1. As humans, we look at the face of other humans or animals for identification, we focus on it. The face of the robot is hard to read.
2. The attention of your model should shift from less interesting (legs) to most interesting (face). Use size, details and choice of color to create more or less interest.
3. The gun can be big, but if it hides most of the torso, it takes away all of the attention from the bot.
4. If you want to have a humanoid bot, you should consider humanoid proportions. Currently the long legs are good for the next miss-robot competition ;-), but for a more menacing look you should consider a more extreme upper body proportions (larger torso,broad shoulders, small waist).
5. The human brain works with relations. It decides that the human in front of it is a child/dwarf (big head on small shoulders) or a giant (small head on broad shoulders) by setting the point of focus (head/face) in relation to the body (shoulders).